What are Open Graph tags?
Open Graph is a set of meta tags, originally from Facebook, that control the title, description and image shown when someone shares your link. Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, Discord, iMessage and X all read them.
When the tags are missing, each platform guesses. You get a random image from the page, a cut-off title, or no image at all. A good share card is often the difference between a post that gets clicks and one that gets scrolled past.
The tags you need
Put these in the <head> of every page you expect people to share:
- og:title: the headline for the card. Can be shorter and punchier than your title tag.
- og:description: one or two sentences.
- og:image: a full https:// URL to a 1200×630 JPG or PNG, under 8MB.
- og:url: the canonical address of the page.
- og:type: "website" for most pages, "article" for posts.
- twitter:card: "summary_large_image" for a big image card on X.
Why is my old image still showing?
Social networks cache share cards, sometimes for weeks. After fixing your tags, ask each platform to fetch the page again: use Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector, both free. Adding a query string such as ?v=2 to the URL you share also forces a fresh preview.